Emacs

Here’s another nice thing about blogging in org-mode: easy tables. You can create a table in org-mode as simple as creating the first line with pipes between each item, and then tab for the next cell or line. Formulas are also pretty simple. Then exporting to a blog turns that into a nice HTML table for you.
For instance, here’s the table I’ve been using to track my garden harvest so far this year, as it looks in org-mode as of today:

I recently upgraded Emacs and BBDB, and it stopped working to auto-complete addresses in Gnus. The error turned out to be that it was trying to run bbdb-migrate to update the database, and I wasn’t loading that. So I just needed to add this to my .emacs:
(require 'bbdb-migrate) And do a C-x C-e at the end of that line to execute it. Then the next time I tried to use BBDB by auto-completing an address, it took a few moments to migrate the database, then worked fine.

I used ido-mode for completion in org-mode for a long time, based on settings I got from Bernt Hansen’s Org Mode config. Recent changes to Org for version 9 have broken a few things. One is that org used to have its own hook into ido-mode for completion on things like refile tasks, using the variable org-completion-use-ido. That no longer exists. The docs say it can use a completion engine via completing-read, but while researching how to do that, I ran across ivy-mode.

I have a function in conkeror that saves a web page’s URL and title, along with any selected text at the time, in Emacs/Org-mode as a captured task, when I hit C-c r. It does this by feeding an org-protocol command through emacsclient. A recent upgrade of org-mode broke it, so I had to change it up a bit. The function in my .conkerorrc used to look like this:
function org_capture (url, title, selection, window) { var cmd_str = 'emacsclient "org-protocol://capture:/w/'+ url + '/' + title + '/' + selection + '"'; if (window !

This is a small thing, but it’s been bugging me for a while, so I’m glad I finally took the time to find a solution.
When I read my email, I don’t respond to anything on the spot. Every message that requires a reply or any other action gets refiled as an org-mode task with a header, timestamp, and link to the message. When I’m finished going through mail and refiling everything that needs an action, I then go to my org-mode agenda, which shows those tasks, and clock each one in while I handle it.

After using for a while (see that page for instructions on setting up the org-mode template), I realized I’d like to have org-mode clock the time I spend commenting on blogs. I already have a ‘Reading Blogs’ task that I clock in for that, but it’d be nice to clock commenting separately, since that’s creating content. Plus, org-mode’s clocking is so nice that I like to use it as well as possible.

Update: I added clocking as a feature later.
I like to save my blog comments and other things I post to the web, for a couple reasons. First, once in a while a comment form fails, especially at sites like Blogspot. You spend 20 minutes writing and proofreading a comment, press the submit button, and poof – an error page and your comment is lost. So saving them provides a backup.

I’ve been getting into http://orgmode.org|org-mode over the last couple years, using it to organize my work and as many other things as possible. Org-mode is an organizer (and much more) that runs in Emacs, which I use for many other things, so it’s a great fit. I owe a great deal of thanks to online with detailed explanation and instructions. He uses it in a very http://gettingthingsdone.com|GTD-style way, which is exactly what I wanted, so I cut-and-pasted much of his base configuration at first, but since then I’ve done some tinkering of my own.